What Does X-UA-Compatible Mean For Me?

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So here I am a couple weeks after the IE team announced through a variety of different channels their proposal to help cushion the blow of their next browser release through the use of a META declaration and HTTP header, “X-UA-Compatible” describing what browser(s) the page and its associated styles and javascript files target.

I’ve got plenty of thoughts on why vendor extensions and related adjustments to behavior are bad. I also have some concerns over this one in particular. Extensions, and more general workarounds and hacks of all kinds [vendor driven or not] get buried into code, reused, copy and pasted, dropped in application templates, removed by accident, and generally used by people who don’t know why they’re doing it, but instead just because it works. As anything other then a very temporary, one time use solution this doesn’t seem to me to solve any problems that are inherent with either web standards or an ecosystem where content publishers are open to who they let see their content. But let me not get too far off onto that tangent and consider first that the proposed solution goes through.

For the moment I want to focus on the practical — what does the additional rendering mode and the ability to switch to it via META declaration mean to me as a working web developer?

Read, Reflect, Opine — IE8 Rendering Switch Proposal

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Through ALA and the IEBlog comes a proposal for a new mechanic of handling the backwards compatibility of web sites — pushing the familiar DOCTYPE Switch aside and going with a new mechanism of declaring target browser versions via meta tag.

The perfect solution or the last sign of the web standards apocalypse? If you’ve got an opinion let it be heard.